Abstract

The earliest phase of Aboriginal-European contact in the far Northeast remains to this day poorly understood. European documentary sources for the sixteenth and first decades of the seventeenth centuries are meager and sometimes contradictory with respect to aboriginal lifeways in the Maritimes, Maine and eastern Quebec region. Archaeology, combined with archaeometric analyses, can improve our knowledge of this elusive period in Northeast history. European materials are often incorporated alongside aboriginal materials on many Contact period sites in the Northeast. In some cases these materials are found in contexts of symbolic significance such as burials. In order to better understand the role that these European materials might play in aboriginal life and afterlife, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses were conducted on European and Native materials from early Contact period sites in Maine and Quebec. Comparable materials from other contact and prehistoric sites in the greater Northeast were analyzed in order to provide baseline data. Despite the fundamental changes which aboriginal society underwent following European contact, the use of European equivalents to aboriginal materials seems to show continuity as well as change in how these materials are incorporated into the physical and symbolic life of aboriginal people during the earliest Contact period.